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Anthony Taylor
Hey there, folks. Welcome to today's episode of the strategy and leadership Podcast. Today I'm joined by Michael Leiter and Michael, hopefully, I get your entire title here. So you're an adjunct professor at Acadia University. You're an honorary professor of Organizational Psychology at Deakin University. And you're also the co-author with a book with Christina Maslach. It's called the burnout challenge, managing people's relationships with their jobs. That is published in Harvard University Press. Did I get all of that?
Michael Leiter
You got all that? Right. I am very impressed. Thank you.
Anthony Taylor
Oh, you're well, you're so well, I am able to read which is great. But I'm just so excited to chat with you. And very cool because you know, coast to coast. I'm in Vancouver, you're on the other side of the country in Nova Scotia. I'm just excited to learn more about you and learn more about what you do. So why don't you tell our listeners anything I might not have mentioned so far, about who you are.
Michael Leiter
I think you've got basically, you're pretty well, I play Irish music on flute. So that's another thing you didn't mention. But that's, that's part of my life.
Anthony Taylor
That is one of the things I really wanted to know. So that's perfect. So also, I'll note that we've got a little bit of connectivity issues just for the video. But hopefully, our listeners don't mind too much, or viewers don't mind too much. But I was just happy to see you. So let's start with the book. What had you want to write the book? Where did you get the idea? Where do you get the inspiration? And what was your journey? And then we'll go from there.
Michael Leiter
Okay, Christina Maslach. And I have been doing research on burnout for many, many, many years, we started way back, I went to California on a sabbatical and worked with her at Berkeley for a year and did some studies. And then it just clicked we started seeing this is a really interesting topic. It's got a lot of legs, it's going to be part of work life for time to come. And we need to be figuring this out. So we thought we put things together. We've been working on this, you know, throughout our careers. And we wanted a book that pulled together, what were the major lessons that we have gained from doing this research over the years. And that's what I have covered, our challenge has turned out to be
Anthony Taylor
cool. Obviously, you know, coming out of COVID, and the past couple of years where burnout and people issues have been, you know, more pronounced or more prevalent, most recently quiet, quitting, and whatever else has probably come up since we record and published this. But how have you seen as somebody who's you know, a professor of organizational psychology, how long have you seen burnout evolve? You know, was it easier when you could have a whiskey at your desk, and it was totally acceptable? Like, what was the evolution of burnout in the workspace?
Michael Leiter
Well, people will find a different way. Workers always make demands on people. And I think what we found with defining this syndrome is that there is this collection of things that are really characteristic of people, when they get sort of pushed a bit too far. And part of it is just feeling exhausted and exhausted in a way so that you're tired before the work begins. Like if you're tired at the end of the workday just means you've worked hard. But if you're tired before the day begins, it means that you're slightly or your way of looking after yourself your way of just everything's out of balance that point, I shouldn't have that happen maybe once in a while, but it shouldn't be a regular part of your life. So that kind of exhaustion is the problem. And then they're going along with that it's this idea. I used to love this work, and I can't stand it anymore. I can't do another customer, another patient, another student. I just can't you know, having lost what was really the motivator that put it into that sort of distancing cynicism, the personalization, whatever that goes along with being really exhausted from what you're doing. And then the third part since along with those two things comes as discouragement. Like it's just not accomplishing anything worthwhile. And just spinning my wheels here, I should get out of this career as fast as I can. So that's the triumvirate, these three dimensions that really define the syndrome and that that's what we measure what we're doing surveys with people to find out how much of that's going on with you.
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Anthony Taylor
And I know that there's I imagine there's a couple of like environmental factors as well. But why would you say that these type of things are becoming more prevalent in the workforce isn't happening more? Is it because the speed of things is it the technology makes it so you can never turn off? So you don't get on exhausted? You know, what's what's driving burnout in 2022?
Michael Leiter
All the all the above that to think about burnout is that is sort of being driven in multiple kinds of ways. I think partly, it is different, it's more difficult for people to get some distance from their child. I mean, one, it's far more important to people both not only in terms of making a living, but also the people's identity, a lot of work now, for people, their values are really tied up, and they're really trying to accomplish something, it makes a difference whether this thing is furthering what I think it's important and, you know, really vital in the world, or whether I think I'm wasting my time that people really want something that is meaningful out of their work, I think that, you know, you can say, well, maybe they shouldn't, but they do. It is part of it. And there's a lot of careers that get that opportunity, there's a lot of substance to a lot of things that people do these days, in terms of communications, in medicine, you know, research and ideas, it's a fascinating that way. And so when people bring that creativity, those aspirations to their work, and find that they're thwarted, that you just can't make it happen, it's really starts hitting those qualities of you know, it just takes away their energy takes away their enthusiasm. And, and I think there's just more of that going on. And, you know, they, the pandemic had elements that aggravated that, but a lot of things that are going on at work life in terms of closely monitoring people and, you know, making all kinds of extraneous demands on people, that is all pushing that envelope as well.
Anthony Taylor
It sounds to me somewhat of a double edged sword, that over, you know, you can tell I'm relatively young in my career relatively, and that, on one hand, the opportunity to follow one's passion, and to dig into something that you're super committed to, provides a life or work life or career with a higher level of fulfillment, satisfaction, like on the hierarchy of needs, you really get to that like self actualization to a deeper level. But on the flip side, it also demands more of you in a good way, because you want to give it that extra, you want to put that 110%, which might be a greater lead to greater burnout through something more satisfying. Whereas if you had a career, you know, all you did was or your job was to fail packing peanuts, and you were dissatisfied, because that was your job, you wouldn't get burnt out, because you might not lean into it as much. Am I understanding what I think you're saying?
Michael Leiter
That that's very much and I think, you know, like, university education has certainly been complicit in all this and say, well, you should do what you believe. And you should do, you know, the work that really is important to so people, it gets beyond, you know, working what you need to do just to pay the bills, and be there, people are looking for something more and and one could argue that that's a reasonable expectation, why shouldn't work life be designed so people can do that, while also, you know, providing the basic tasks that need to get done for the job, but have that capacity for people to reach beyond that? And I think that's a lot of ways workplaces are put together just it doesn't allow so much for all that it gets to constraint on
Anthony Taylor
people. Yeah, well, I read imagine also the function of the evolution of opportunities. If you're in Nova Scotia, and you can only work in Nova Scotia 2030 years ago, you were kind of limited to the jobs that were available. Now, the opportunity to work anywhere in any field is boundless. And so the propensity and availability for somebody to work in a career that they want to work in versus the job that's available, you know, a 15 minute drive from their house has also changed the dynamic of employers or employees, but also employers thoughts on that.
Michael Leiter
I think that's that's very much happening. I think they, you know, the great resignation was really a great, great job shift. And a lot of people were leaving lines of work that just simply weren't doing it for them and looking for those opportunities they do. And the people who did that shift are the people who really got better up to something that's people with energy people with aspirations, it's actually the kind of people that you want to hire. And that have been, you know, then you get into those positions which have more latitude. And, and people are finding their feet in that and beginning to really get things going. I'm not convinced as much as they quiet quitting. I'm not sure that's as much of a real thing. I'd be saw real data about people leaving jobs like there was data on that. I think the quiet click Sort of an idea, but I think very few people are going to really be content with a world where they're doing the absolute minimum and seeing if they could skim by on that. One. I think things are monitored a bit too closely to keep skimming by for very long and secondly, it's boring.
Anthony Taylor
You don't want to be doing it once it goes To get to that, like, Hey, if you're doing the thing that you want, you know, why would you give the minimum just because you're paid that maybe switch gears a little bit, because it's interesting, like, you know, the great job shift. And we've talked primarily about employees. So the kind of demand or supply side, I suppose, but if we look at managers, and people that are impacting that, so I know that the burnout risks were you had mentioned in the book a couple things, insufficient rewards, socially toxic workspace community, absence of fairness, and values conflict. And a lot of those are not, in fact, driven by the employees, but typically driven by managers and owners. So what is the role that managers, owners, CEOs, etc, play in that level of burnout at the individual?
Michael Leiter
Right, I think the, it's a big part because that's the way that we look at it is that burnout is results from a breakdown in the relationship between the person and the workplace and how they run that. So it's, the problem is not something deep within people like mental illness or something like it's not like that at all. It's a relationship problem between a person and their workplace. And some of that is relationships with specific individuals, particularly their supervisors, or whatever in the workplace. What you find when we do these surveys that cover these, those six areas of work life is that burnout correlates with everything, whatever you're looking at, if you ask people about the parking availability, it will correlate with the burnout scale, everything correlates with the burnout scale, because it goes to a core of how people are feeling and how they perceive the world. But what that means that, that doesn't mean well, you got to change everything. Because what it does mean is you can change, whatever you change is probably going to be a good idea, it's probably going to help people out. And so the question we look at is not what is the most powerful thing related to burnout? Because that's probably workload, as often there's very little, there's few options for really reducing people's workload, that isn't the most available thing for a manager to change. But these other aspects, the question is, what can you change? And can you change person's sense of control? Can you really get a person have a better sense of feeling of control over when they do the work? How they do the work with whom they do the work? Can you increase control? Or can you improve community, that's something I've worked on a lot with, we've sort of developed a, a, an intervention process, that's, I like to doing family therapy with work groups, you can go when you find that there's strange relationships to have deadly or anything, it's just, some people are feeling just lonely, they're feeling unsupported people are just taking them for granted. They say good morning, and nobody really responds in any kind of cheerful way. You know, people really want to belong to a workgroup that cherishes them, they really do. They want to be valued, they want to be with these people that might make spending my days. And so what you'll find is that you don't have to eliminate all the little, little weaknesses, people will be rude, and consider it themselves. For some of the time, that's just life. But you can make a positive interaction surrounding that to be much more prevalent. And if you can improve that community, and move people away from being rude and towards being more appreciative and acknowledging of each other, that's gonna push people away from burnout and pulled them over towards being more engaged in their work. Because that social dynamic is very powerful people who are experiencing burnout, we ask them, what's your relationships with other people, or they're saying people wrote to me all the time, some people are just really bothering me. But they're also saying, I'm pretty rude to other people too, because energy to put up with these idiots. So you find that you end up with a social dynamic, when people are really feeling burnt out. That's really strange, both giving and receiving. If you can go in and change that booth things for the better. That's one another approach that you could do that would. But all those have to be real interventions, you can't just pretend to give people more control over their work. And not really, people are smart enough to know when they have that you've got to make any of those areas to work life values, fairness, rewards any of those, if you work on any of those, they're going to have a beneficial effect that some of them are gonna be more powerful in one setting than another. But you've got all these options and you got to know your people. You got your you got to give your frontline supervisors the capacity to make some adjustments with people you can't say everybody's got to be treated the exact treated exactly the saying, that's not gonna get you very far, you got to, they've got to have the capacity to say, Okay, we come up with a better solution for you about how you do your work in this kind of setting, you know, that kind of idea. And then you can start getting to where these more people and more diverse kind of workforce can find good relationships with their workplace, rather than being really strained and a mismatch between what they're aspiring to and what's available to them.
Anthony Taylor
That's Versa, as you're listening, review the last like five minutes and play that like two or three times, no matter where you're at in your organization, there was some real gold in there. My god tried to encapsulate some of that, so one of us, you know, at the heart of it, because I always like looking at the root cause it's a breakdown between the relationship between the work the workplace and the individual. So start there, because the work itself on its own might not be the thing, but it's the workplace, the work and the individual. I find that it's the perception and the expectation, potentially a breakdown there potentially a breakdown with the value drivers. But at the end of it, it's couldn't be the workload, but you can't always impact the workload, yes. But not always, because there's always work to be done. Change, sense of control sense of community, feeling valued, is critical to being able to do that. And then also being able to measure some or many of those things. And you didn't say this explicitly, on a scale to see how you're doing, and then making sure that the people are empowered to make changes towards that so that they can actually support what that is, did I capture some if not, most
Michael Leiter
of it captured really well, and Christina Maslach. And I major focus in our career has been developing measures so that people can put this thing together, figure out how you can use these measures to not only identify, well, who's on the burnout end, but who's on the positive end, and what's going on with that. And then some of the things that are in between, like one of the distinctions that we find think that's very important is between people who are burnt out who are exhausted and cynical and discouraged. And contrast those with people who are just exhausted. But they love their work. And they think they're accomplishing great things. But they're just exhausted, because they don't have enough support or putting in too many or whatever, for whatever reason, that that often gets mislabeled as burnout. But it's a much simpler, much more straightforward problem to address and addressing people who are not only exhausted, but they're utterly cynical, and they're other late discouraged. It's really hard to reach them, people who are overworked. That's it just exhausted. They've got an answer. Let's deal with this workload issue. Let's deal with it. That's whenever we got to deal with it. That's, that's a much more straightforward problem. It's definitely solvable. And it can address a lot of people in today's work world that are feeling over extended in that way.
Anthony Taylor
Yeah, I like that. One of the things that for those of you that have been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know that the reason why I like doing strategic planning is because if you have a clear vision of where the company goes in the team is working well and aligned, it means you're going to have a happier work, if you have a happier work, you're going to have a happier home, if you have a happier home, you're going to have a happier community. And so strategic planning is our way of changing the world. So Michael, it sounds like that I'm not just making stuff up. But there is alignment between having happy workplace a happy home and a happy community. And that way, you're not a jerk to everybody walked by, I can't guarantee it, but decrease the likelihood.
Michael Leiter
Absolutely. I'm being kind right there at the beginning at the middle of it. Yes,
Anthony Taylor
absolutely. And one of the things that you had mentioned, again, for our leaders, because one of the things that come up and you hear about it, probably because it's sexy or newsworthy where you hear about like toxic workplaces, but it's like, the thing you can do is remove the toxin. And you might be in a toxic in your own workplace. But if you don't remove that thing from the environment, it's just gonna make the terrible environment for everybody. And that's going to contribute to the, you know, the burnout, that's going to contribute to people shifting out of their jobs. Michael has your research explicitly, or anecdotally found the same thing.
Michael Leiter
It definitely found the same thing. And we also found that I mean, you can remove but even better, you can turn a person around, you can just actually and that's where we do you know what we were doing these groups with workplaces, you know, getting across the people that you know, this strategy. That's really annoying people, that's really annoying people and you don't have to do that. And we can come up together work out better ways of doing that. We've done a lot where you get a workgroup where you look at the survey you find that actually the person that group has the most difficult they with is actually the supervisor. One We find that we take the supervisor out and do coaching with them for a while and say, Look, if you've got to go anywhere with this supervisor thing, these days, you can't have everybody, you've got to actually get across to your people. And you can train them and people will respond to that you can and then put them back to group into a whole group process. To take things forward. I think improving those relationships is one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader within a workplace,
Anthony Taylor
when it's just so what are the odds for me? Because I sometimes see like, Hey, if you have a person who's who's toxic, for lack of a better word, and it's not contributing to the environment, but were they like that before? Or was the other factors like they did they become burnt out or they become disengaged, and they are now then taking it out on everybody else. And so really, again, getting to the source of that is key. I think there's just there's so much to go on this. But I think just again, there's some really great pieces here that our listeners can take in to just assess their workplaces and make really tangible steps to make the lives of their employees and their people different and better. And I just really appreciate you for sharing today. Where can people connect with you? Where can they learn more about your work? Where can they? I don't know, take one of your classes in Australia, if they're around, you know, what's the best way to get engaged?
Michael Leiter
That's gonna get engaged. Well, I have a website in the lighter.com. And so that is available. And I can also mark the book, which is called burnout challenge, and it's coming out in a couple of weeks.
Anthony Taylor
Excellent. It'll be out by the time the episode is published, which is exciting. So make sure we put a link in there and then lighter spelled l e i, t er. So make sure that we get the right. Right spelling there. So Michael, thank you again, it's been such a pleasure. And I just appreciate the time. And it's been I learned a lot today. And I think our listeners did, too. So thank you so much for the time.
Michael Leiter
Thank you. I've really enjoyed talking with you today. It's just great.
Anthony Taylor
Absolutely. So folks, thank you to my guest, Michael Leiter, who's the author of the burnout challenge, managing people's relationships with their jobs, and for me and the tons of podcasts, talked to a lot of CEOs in coaching and on on this show, and one of the biggest things is looking at the relationship between the work the person and the workplace. And if you are committed to creating a great place, look at people's relationship within it, and make sure that you have the facts and factors that support them. So thank you again, Michael to my guest. My name is Anthony Taylor. This has been the strategy and leadership podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you watching. I appreciate you being here. And I'll see you next time.
My name is Anthony Taylor. This has been the Strategy & Leadership Podcast - appreciate you watching. If you're looking for somebody to help you keep your eyes on the road as it relates to strategy, be sure to reach out to us, we'd be happy to help. So thanks so much for joining us today.
Until next time!
